Karen Donovan

Orient

Heel prints of men and cattle
mark the ground at the watering place
The mean wanders from center point

I love you I love you I love you please

At the watering place
men and cattle wander

Look I’ll mark the ground
Here is where we’ll meet
Right here

Scores wander off the curve
Fresh prints of men and cattle, filling with snow
I know you can find it, it’s on the map

The map is a map
There is a forest there is a steppe
There is a watering place

Point line plane solid hypersolid
Angle radian perimeter sphere, cherubim seraphim
Men and cattle, later a panther

Find Sirius Rigel Aldebaran

Horizon: The tabletop The doorstep The road

Orchil sunset
Sweet fig
Tracer bullets

The woodsmoke
The slipknot
The clove

Origin

About how in the beginning it was
strong yet viscoelastic with certain properties
that distinguished it from sheet metal
About how you can walk out on it for ice fishing in January
About how it flows when warm like asphalt
O how light it was

Which made it advantageous for aerospace applications
Hallelujah how there was no darkness in it
because we had had enough of that
About how it made everything
except for everything that wasn’t since there isn’t
anything else than what keeps on getting

made and remade from ingredients the experts dispute
About how nonlinearly it iridescently was
hard to predict with a tendency under load to deform
As worms grow wings hillsides implode bones rattle up
from rotor-whipped sands and begin to sing like flutes
O how in the beginning it was

Karen Donovan is the author of Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press). Her poems have appeared recently in Blackbird, Conjunctions, and Mudlark. For 20 years, with Walker Rumble, she published ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of short prose. contact